(Routledge key guides) Solomon, M. Scott_ Griffiths, Martin_ Roach, Steven C. - Fifty key thinkers in international relations-Routledge (2010).pdf

FIFTY KEY THINKERS IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECOND EDITION Now in its second edition, Fifty Key Thinkers in International Relations has been thoroughly updated with 14 new entries and a new preface to reﬂect the latest developments. There are new sections on Constructivism, International Political Theory, and English School, as well as a range of new thinkers. They include: Samuel Huntington Jürgen Habermas Barry Buzan Christine Sylvester John Rawls. Fully cross-referenced throughout, this book has everything for students of politics and international relations or indeed anyone who wants to gain an understanding of how nations can work together successfully. Martin Griﬃths is Associate Professor in the School of Political and International Studies at Flinders University, Australia. He is the author of International Relations Theory for the 21st Century (2007), Realism, Idealism, and International Politics (1995), and co-author (with Terry O'Callaghan and Steven C. Roach) of International Relations: The Key Concepts, Second Edition (2007), all available from Routledge. Steven C. Roach is Assistant Professor of International Aﬀairs in the Department of Government and International Aﬀairs at the University of South Florida. Among his books are Critical Theory of International Politics (Routledge, forthcoming), Governance, Order, and the International Criminal Court (2009), Critical Theory and International Relations: A Reader (Routledge, 2007), and Politicizing the International Criminal Court (2006). M. Scott Solomon is Assistant Professor of International Aﬀairs in the Department of Government and International Aﬀairs at the University of South Florida. He is the co-author (with Mark Rupert) of Globalization and International Political Economy: The Politics of Alternative Futures (2006). ALSO AVAILABLE FROM ROUTLEDGE Economics: The Basics Tony Cleaver 978-0-415-31412-1 The Routledge Companion to Global Economics Edited by Robert Benyon 978-0-415-24306-3 Fifty Major Economists Steven Pressman 978-0-415-13481-1 Fifty Major Political Thinkers Ian Adams and R.W. Dyson 978-0-415-40099-2 Fifty Key Thinkers on the Environment Joy Palmer 978-0-415-14699-9 FIFTY KEY THINKERS IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Second Edition Martin Griﬃths, Steven C. Roach and M. Scott Solomon First published 1999 by Routledge This edition published 2009 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 1999 Martin Griﬃths, 2009 Martin Griﬃths, Steven C. Roach, M. Scott Solomon All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-88599-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0-415-77570-1 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-415-77571-X (pbk) ISBN10: 0-203-88687-9 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-77570-0 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-77571-7 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-88687-8 (ebk) CONTENTS Preface to the Second Edition vii Realism 1 Raymond Aron 3 Edward Hallet Carr 9 Robert Gilpin 16 John Herz 23 Samuel Huntington 30 George Kennan 36 Stephen Krasner 42 Hans Morgenthau 50 Kenneth Waltz 58 Liberalism 65 Karl W. Deutsch 67 Michael Doyle 73 Francis Fukuyama 81 Ernst Haas 91 Stanley Hoﬀmann 98 Robert O. Keohane 105 Richard Rosecrance 114 Constructivism 123 Friedrich Kratochwil 125 Nicholas Onuf 130 Christian Reus-Smit 137 John Gerard Ruggie 143 Alexander Wendt 151 Critical Theory 161 Robert Cox 163 André Gunder Frank 171 v CONTENTS Stephen Gill 178 Antonio Gramsci 186 Jürgen Habermas 193 Andrew Linklater 201 English School 211 Hedley Bull 213 Barry Buzan 220 Timothy Dunne 226 John Vincent 232 Martin Wight 240 Postmodernism 249 Richard Ashley 251 David Campbell 258 Michel Foucault 265 Robert B.J. Walker 273 Feminism 279 Jean Bethke Elshtain 281 Cynthia Enloe 287 Christine Sylvester 294 J. Ann Tickner 302 International Political Theory/International Ethics 309 Charles Beitz 311 David Held 318 Terry Nardin 326 John Rawls 334 Michael Walzer 341 Historical Sociology 351 Anthony Giddens 353 Michael Mann 360 Justin Rosenberg 369 Charles Tilly 374 Immanuel Wallerstein 383 Index 392 vi P R E F A C E TO TH E S ECO N D EDITION Since the publication of the ﬁrst edition of Fifty Key Thinkers in International Relations, the ﬁeld of international relations has under- gone signiﬁcant transformation. Constructivism, for instance, which was not listed as a section in the ﬁrst edition, is now a fairly well established paradigm in international relations. In addition, feminism has continued to emerge as a prominent radical approach in international relations, as has postmodernism and critical theory (in the Frankfurt School tradition). Aside from these changes within the discipline, outside events have dramatically reshaped the international landscape and, in the process, inspired and encouraged international relations scholars and practitioners to rethink the issues and problems. This second edition is an attempt to showcase some of the key thinkers who have, or continue to, shed new theoretical and empirical light on international events of the past 10 years (the Kosovo War, the 9/11 attacks and the War on Terror) and on new trends within the discipline. In doing so, it treats the ﬁeld of international relations theory as an engaged, yet pluralist study of the struggles for power in the international realm. However, it recognizes that international relations is a ﬁeld in search of a reﬂexive, overarching paradigm, even a pluralist rigour that would frame the contributions of many diﬀerent, competing approaches. As this apparent crisis in the discipline suggests, there are many new challengers to the existing conventional paradigms, with no one thinker standing out from the others. This second edition also reﬂects the need to incorporate the increasing inﬂuence of new thinkers and their attendant ideas and key theoretical approaches. Accordingly, we have added the following new sections to reﬂect the recent methodological developments in the ﬁeld: Constructivism, the English School, and International Political Theory/International Ethics. We have also moved Theories of International Society, which appeared in the ﬁrst edition, to the English vii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION School, and deleted International Organization and Theories of the Nation to make room for the three new sections. In all, we have added 14 new thinkers. Like the ﬁrst edition, this second edition seeks to capture the complexity and allure of international relations through the lenses of its most inﬂuential thinkers. There will always be some thinkers deserving some special recognition. But whether one agrees with David Held’s or Andrew Linklater’s cosmopolitan ethics, it is important to recognize the wide-ranging inﬂuence of their cosmopolitan models. In the same way, Alexander Wendt’s social theory of inter- national politics has signiﬁcantly inﬂuenced our thinking about the relationship between state power and socialization. One might also add to this list the political theorists who continue to remain important sources of thinking about the ethics and moral principles of the international system, including John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. In formulating the criteria below, we have sought to dampen much of the controversy. Our criteria are based on two very open-ended, general questions: Which thinkers have introduced and formulated new and sustainable insights into international relations? And how have these insights generated new niches and models for constructing knowledge of international relations? In time, these questions ulti- mately gave way to four key criteria for selecting a key thinker: (1) depth, (2) novelty, (3) applicability and (4) imagination. (1) Depth refers to the level of sophistication of the thinker’s theoretical analysis and applied theory. In this sense, it refers to the level or degree of engagement of the original theorist, or ideas that she or he has applied to international relations. (2) Novelty characterizes the originality of the thinker’s contribu- tions. Did he or she set in motion new trends in thinking about international phenomena? And to what extent have his or her contributions to the ﬁeld stood the test of time, as would be the case with some of the traditional political theories and older international relations theorists? (3) Applicability is conceived in terms of the systematization of ideas and theories. Do the thinker’s ideas and insights oﬀer generative principles or highly sophisticated systematic theoretical models? (4) Imagination reﬂects the following two questions: How do the thinker’s contributions allow us to imagine the changing forces of international relations? Does he or she open up new spaces of thinking about the holism of international relations, or understanding of the changing adaptations or transformations of the global realm? viii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Such criteria are by no means deﬁnitive. Those thinkers whose research and ideas have scored highly in one or more, or all of these categories, have not only exercised a strong past and/or present impact on international relations, but have earned the right to be labelled as one of the 50 key thinkers in international relations. Steven C. Roach and M. Scott Solomon May 2008 ix REALISM Relations among states take place in the absence of a world govern- ment. For realists, this means that the international system is anarchical. International relations are best understood by focusing on the dis- tribution of power among states. Despite their formal legal equality, the uneven distribution of power means that the arena of international relations is a form of ‘power politics’. Power is hard to measure; its distribution among states changes over time and there is no consensus among states about how it should be distributed. International relations is therefore a realm of necessity (states must seek power to survive in a competitive environment) and continuity over time. When realists contemplate change in the international system, they focus on changes in the balance of power among states, and tend to discount the possibility of fundamental change in the dynamics of the system itself. The following key thinkers all subscribe to these basic assumptions in their explorations of the following questions: (1) What are the main sources of stability and instability in the international system? (2) What is the actual and preferred balance of power among states? (3) How should the great powers behave towards one another and towards weaker states? (4) What are the sources and dynamics of contemporary changes in the balance of power? Despite some shared assumptions about the nature of international relations, realists are not all of one voice in answering these questions, and it would be wrong to believe that shared assumptions lead to similar conclusions among them. In fact, there is sharp disagreement over the relative merits of particular balances of power (unipolarity, bipolarity and multipolarity). There is also much debate over the causal relationship between states and the international pressures upon them, and the relative importance of diﬀerent kinds of power in contemporary international relations. RAYMOND ARON RAYMOND ARON Raymond Aron was born in 1905 in Paris, the same year as Jean-Paul Sartre. They were both educated at the elite school Ecole Normale Supérieure, which also produced such authors and politicians as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Leon Blum, Georges Pompidou and Michel Foucault. Although Sartre’s name was usually much better known, in part because Aron’s Gaullism and staunch anti-communism made him a pariah among French left-wing intellectuals from the 1940s to the 1970s, his reputation has risen since his death in 1983 in comparison with that of his old sparring partner. Aron’s work is too complex and extensive to lend itself to a neat summary. He was a journalist as well as a sociologist, and the range of his intellectual interests went far beyond the concerns of most students of international relations. In the ﬁeld of international relations, Aron is best known for his book Peace and War, which ﬁrst appeared in English in 1966. In addition to this book, the discursive range and historical depth of which did not make easy reading for students in search of a master key to unlock the apparent contingencies of interstate relations, Aron is also remembered for his incisive analysis of the dilemmas of strategy in the nuclear age. While it is not unfair, as we shall see, to classify him within the realist school of thought, it is also important to appreciate some of the main diﬀerences between his approach to the study of international relations and that of North American realist thinkers. As a French Jew who had spent some time in Germany just before Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s, Aron’s reaction to the rise of fas- cism in Europe and Stalinism in the Soviet Union set him apart from most French intellectuals in the postwar era. Despite his philosophical training in the abstract theories of history contained in the works of Marx and Hegel, his abhorrence of utopian thought and totalitarian- ism in all its forms lent an air of critical pessimism to his writing and a refusal to entertain the possibility that politics could ever be an appropriate arena for promoting particular versions of the good life by force at the expense of others. In 1978 he wrote that: [t]he rise of National Socialism…and the revelation of politics in its dialogical essence forced me to argue against myself, against my intimate preferences; it inspired in me a sort of revolt against the instruction I had received at the university, against the spiri- tuality of philosophers, and against the tendency of certain sociologists to misconstrue the impact of regimes with the pretext of focusing on permanent realities.1 3 RAYMOND ARON This experience instilled in Aron a commitment to liberalism and an admiration for the work of Max Weber, rather than the utopianism and historical materialism of Marx that inspired other European intellectuals similarly disenchanted with progressive evolutionary the- ories of history (see in particular his book The Opium of the Intellectuals, published in 1955). A prudent approach to the theory and practice of politics lay in the acknowledgement of diﬀerent of and often incompatible political values, and therefore in the availability of and competition between divergent interpretations/ideologies that privileged some at the expense of others. Particular interpretations could be analysed critically in terms of their internal consistency, as well as their com- patibility with existing social and political structures, but it would be utopian to believe in the use of reason to transcend such competition. Informed by this outlook, much of Aron’s work focused on the nature of industrialization and the viability of diﬀerent ways of pro- moting it in capitalist and allegedly ‘socialist’ societies. He was one of the ﬁrst to argue that the Soviet model of central planning, while it facilitated forced industrialization, was not appropriate for running an ever more complicated industrial society.2 In principle, he defended Western, liberal capitalism against its leftist critics as the best means of combining economic growth with some measure of political freedom and economic redistribution. While recognizing the fact of class conﬂict, he never believed in the idea that ‘the working class’ was either suﬃciently homogeneous or motivated to revolt against the inequities of capitalist society. If capitalist societies could combine the search for proﬁts with some measure of welfare and redistribution, he saw no reason why the conﬂict between workers and capitalists should be zero-sum. Indeed, he hoped that in the longer term such societies could moderate ideological competition, although he wor- ried about the dominance of pressure groups in weakening the democratic process and depriving liberal states of suﬃcient ‘steering capacity’ in the interests of the society as a whole. When it came to the study of international relations rather than industrialization per se, Aron was inspired by the work of Hobbes and Clausewitz. To some extent, he shared the realist view that there was a fundamental diﬀerence between domestic and international relations, and that this diﬀerence should be the foundation for all international theory. For Aron, foreign policy is constituted by dip- lomatic–strategic behaviour, and international relations takes place in the shadow of war. By this, he did not mean that war was always likely, but that the legitimacy of violence to secure state goals was shared among states, and it could not be monopolized as it had been 4 RAYMOND ARON within the territorial boundaries of the state. In his most famous phrase, international relations is ‘relations between political units, each of which claims the right to take justice into its own hands and to be the sole arbiter of the decision to ﬁght or not to ﬁght’.3 Of course, such an argument seems to place Aron squarely within the realist camp, but on closer examination Aron’s work is far more subtle than that of, say, Hans Morgenthau or Kenneth Waltz. While he agreed with Morgenthau that international relations was in some respects a struggle for power among states, the concept of power was too nebulous to serve as a master key for understanding international relations. Similarly, while he would agree with Waltz that the milieu of international relations was a unique structured environment, the latter did not determine state goals. Indeed, state ‘goals’ could not be reduced to a simple formula at all: Security, power, glory, ideas, are essentially heterogeneous objectives which can be reduced to a single term only by dis- torting the human meaning of diplomatic strategic action. If the rivalry of states is comparable to a game, what is ‘at stake’ cannot be designated by a single concept, valid for all civilisations at all periods. Diplomacy is a game in which the players sometimes risk losing their lives, sometimes prefer victory to the advantages that would result from it.4 In the absence of a simple formula to predict state goals, the best one could do as a thinker, diplomat or strategist is to attempt an under- standing of state aims and motives on the best evidence available. Peace and War may be disappointing for those in search of ahistorical generalizations, as it is at best a collection of partial hypotheses based on the ways in which states inﬂuence one another in light of diﬀerent historical eras; the ‘material’ constraints of space (geography), popu- lation (demography) and resources (economics); and the ‘moral’ determinants arising from states’ ‘styles of being and behaving’.5 International theory, for Aron, ought not to try and privilege any one of these categories over the other, but to blend all three in a histori- cally sensitive attempt to chart processes of change and continuity over time in the interaction of such ‘determinants’. If this is the case, while it may make sense to compare historical eras characterized by, for example, bipolar and multipolar conﬁgurations of power, hypotheses concerning their relevant stability could only be tentative in light of the fact that one cannot ignore the character of particular states within a distinct era. Whether the states share certain values or common 5 RAYMOND ARON interests may be just as important as how they stand in relation to one another on some quantitative scale of ‘power’. Similarly, much of Peace and War is devoted to reproducing and analysing the weakness of a number of schools of thought that, in Aron’s view, exaggerate the inﬂuence of environmental factors, such as geopolitics and the Marxist–Leninist theory of economic imperialism, as causes of war. Aron points out, for example, that the ‘excess capital’ of France – which according to the theory would require overseas colonies to be invested in – usually went to South America and Russia rather than North Africa. Moreover, he suggested that there was no good reason why home markets should not expand indeﬁnitely to absorb any ‘excess production’ of the advanced capitalist states. In contrast, he emphasized traditional interstate rivalry as the main ‘cause’ of war. The ﬁnal part of Peace and War is taken up with the question of how the international system has changed in the post-1945 era. Here he is particularly interested in whether nuclear weapons have funda- mentally changed strategic thinking about the role of force in foreign policy. In this book and elsewhere, Aron showed a keen awareness of just how ambiguous the evidence was, as well as the central dilemmas facing the strategy and ethics of statecraft in the nuclear age. On the one hand, he recognized that nuclear weapons are funda- mentally diﬀerent from conventional weapons in that their destruc- tiveness, speed of delivery and limited military utility require that they be used to deter war rather than ﬁght it. For the ﬁrst time in human history, nuclear armed states had the ability to destroy each other without having to defeat their opponents’ armed forces. As soon as the superpowers were in a condition of mutually assured destruction (a condition reached by the late 1950s), they were in a condition of what has come to be called ‘existential’ deterrence. Each side had the capability to destroy the other totally in a retaliatory second nuclear strike, and the extreme sanction and fear of escalation were suﬃcient to deter each other from ever embarking on a ﬁrst strike. For Aron, this existential condition was secure as long as neither superpower could destroy the other’s retaliatory capability in a nuclear attack, and as long as no iron-clad defence against nuclear weapons could be constructed. The eﬀectiveness or credibility of nuclear deterrence did not rely on complex strategies or doctrines employed by either side to make the other certain of what would happen should direct conﬂict break out between them. The credibility of deterrence lay in the weapons themselves, not in the attempts by states to think of nuclear war in conventional terms, and Aron severely criticized nuclear planners and game theorists in the United States for thinking 6 RAYMOND ARON otherwise. As with his exhortations regarding the inherent limitations of international theory in general, Aron insisted that nuclear strategy could never become anything like an exact science. On the other hand, if Clausewitz was of limited help in thinking about the conditions under which nuclear war could be fought and ‘won’, the greater stability there was in deterrence between the United States and the Soviet Union (notwithstanding the arms race between them), the less there was at lower levels in the international system. The superpowers themselves could be tempted to use conventional weapons in their ‘proxy’ wars, unless this gave rise to fears of escalation, and regional conﬂicts would continue in the shadow of the nuclear standoﬀ between the big two. Aron concluded that the Cold War was both unprecedented and, in the context of the ideological diﬀerences between two superpowers armed with nuclear weapons, inevitable. Despite, or rather because of, the unprecedented dangers of the nuclear era, combined with the uncertainty that had always char- acterized international relations, Aron believed strongly in prudence as the most appropriate ethics of statecraft. By this he meant the need to substitute an ethics of consequences over conviction: To be prudent is to act in accordance with the particular situation and the concrete data, and not in accordance with some system or out of passive obedience to a norm…it is to prefer the limitation of violence to the punishment of the presumably guilty party or to a so-called absolute justice; it is to establish concrete accessible objectives…and not limitless and perhaps meaningless [ones], such as ‘a world safe for democracy’ or ‘a world from which power politics has disappeared’.6 In short, Raymond Aron must be remembered for his sober realism and liberal pluralism as a student of international relations and as a critic of Cold War excesses. In addition, he remorselessly alerted us to the limits that we can expect from theory and the need to base our generalizations on a deep familiarity with the contingencies of history, and to avoid either falling into a permanent cynicism or entertaining utopian hopes for the transcendence of international relations. Notes 1. ‘On the historical condition of the sociologist’, reprinted in a collection of Aron’s essays, History and Politics, M.B. Conant (ed.), New York, Free Press, 1978, p. 65. 7 RAYMOND ARON 2. See, in particular, Raymond Aron, Democracy and Totalitarianism, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968. 3. Raymond Aron, Peace and War, New York, Praeger, 1968, p. 5. 4. Ibid., p. 91. 5. Ibid., p. 279. 6. Ibid., p. 585. Aron’s major writings The Century of Total War, London, Derek Verschoyle, 1954. The Opium of the Intellectuals, transl. Terence Kilmartin, London, Secker & Warburg, 1957. Diversity of Worlds: France and the United States Look at Their Common Problems, Westport, Connecticut, The Greenwood Press, 1957. France: The New Republic, New York, Oceana Publications, 1960. Introduction to the Philosophy of History: An Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity, transl. George J. Irwin, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1961. The Dawn of Universal History, transl. Dorothy Pickles, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1961. The Great Debate: Theories of Nuclear Strategy, transl. Ernst Pawel, Garden City, New York, Doubleday, 1965. ‘What is a theory of international relations?’, Journal of International Aﬀairs 21 (1967), pp. 185–206. On War, transl. Terence Kilmartin, New York, W.W. Norton, 1968. Peace and War, transl. Richard Howard and Annette Baker-Fox, New York, Praeger, 1968. Progress and Disillusion: The Dialectics of Modern Society, London, Pall Mall, 1968. Democracy and Totalitarianism, trans. Valence Ionescu, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968. Marxism and the Existentialists, New York, Harper & Row, 1969. The Imperial Republic: The United States and the World, 1945–1973, transl. Frank Jellinek, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975. Politics and History, ed. Miriam Bernheim, London, The Free Press, 1978. Memoires, Paris, Julliard, 1983. Clausewitz: Philosopher of War, transl. Christine Booker and Norman Stone, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983. History, Truth, Liberty: Selected Writings of Raymond Aron, ed. Franciszek Draus, with a memoir by Edward Shils, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985. Power, Modernity, and Sociology: Selected Sociological Writings, ed. Dominique Schnapper and transl. Peter Morris, Aldershot, Gower, 1988. See also: Hoﬀmann, Morgenthau, Waltz Further reading ‘Raymond Aron: a critical retrospective and prospective’, special edition of International Studies Quarterly 29 (1985). 8 EDWARD HALLETT CARR Baverez, Nicolas, Raymond Aron, Lyon, Manufacture, 1986. Colquhoun, Robert, Raymond Aron: Volume One: The Philosopher in History, 1905–1955, Beverly Hills, California, Sage, 1986. Colquhoun, Robert, Raymond Aron: Volume Two: The Sociologist in Society, 1955–1983, Beverly Hills, California, Sage, 1986. Mahony, Daniel J., The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron, Oxford, Rowman & Littleﬁeld, 1991. EDWARD HALLETT CARR E.H. Carr is best known for his book The Twenty Years’ Crisis, which combines a trenchant critique of Western diplomacy between the two world wars with an inﬂuential framework of analysis. Carr’s work helped to establish the terms on which international theory has been discussed in the twentieth century, namely as an ongoing debate between ‘realists’ and ‘idealists’ or ‘utopians’. Carr did not begin this debate, nor did he stake out his own position clearly within it. What he did do was demonstrate how two contrasting conceptions of historical progress manifested themselves in international thought and practice. Furthermore, the facility with which he combined philosophical reﬂection, historical analysis and commentary on current aﬀairs ensured that this book remains one of the classics in the ﬁeld. Carr was born in 1892, and he graduated from Cambridge University with a ﬁrst class degree in classics when the First World War interrupted his studies. He joined the Foreign Oﬃce and atten- ded the Paris Peace Conference at the end of the Great War. He returned to academia in 1936, when he was appointed Wilson Professor of International Politics at the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth. When the Second World War broke out, he became assistant editor of The Times newspaper in London. He returned to Cambridge in 1953, where he remained to concentrate on his research into the history of the Soviet Union. Although his research into the Soviet Union culminated in the publication of 14 books on the subject, Carr will always be best known for his contribution to the ascendancy of ‘realism’ in the study of international relations based on The Twenty Years’ Crisis. In this book, ﬁrst published in 1939 (the second edition appeared in 1946), Carr engages in a sustained critique of the ‘utopian’ thinking that he argues dominated Western intellectual thought and diplomatic practice in the interwar years. He suggests that all human sciences, particularly when they are young, tend to be somewhat prescriptive, subordinating the analysis of facts to the desire to reform the world. 9 EDWARD HALLETT CARR The study of international relations, he argues, was overly inﬂuenced by a set of ideas that were themselves products of a particular balance of power in which Britain enjoyed a dominant role. Thus, it was committed to eﬀorts to bring about international peace on the basis of norms and principles which were in fact limited to the historical experience of domestic politics and economics in Britain, and they could not be applied internationally in a world divided among states with very diﬀerent degrees of power and commitment to the inter- national status quo. Chief among these were the beliefs in both the natural harmony of interests (derived from nineteenth-century laissez- faire economics) and collective security. In particular, the latter treated war as a consequence of ‘aggression’ across borders. If it were to be abolished, there would need to be an international organization; states would commit themselves to the rule of law and be prepared to co-operate to deter and, if necessary, punish ‘aggressors’, with a spectrum of measures ranging from diplomacy and economic sanctions to the use of collective force to assist the victims of aggression. Carr argued that the faith and optimism concerning col- lective security, as well as the institution of the League of Nations, which was designed to implement it, was based on the erroneous assumption that the territorial and political status quo was satisfactory to all the major powers in the international system. In a world of separate sovereign states of unequal power, this was unlikely ever to be the case. Conﬂict among states, therefore, was not merely a con- sequence of a failure to understand one another, but an inevitable result of incompatible aspirations that could only be dealt with on the basis of negotiation in light of the balance of power, rather than by appealing to ‘universal’ principles of moral conduct. He therefore dismissed the idea that peace could result from the replication among states of judicial or legislative processes that could be enforced by the state within the domestic arena. Carr recommended that scholars and diplomats could have avoided some of the problems of the interwar period if they had adopted a less idealistic and more ‘realistic’ approach to international aﬀairs. This approach would entail the need to substitute rhetoric with diplomacy, and to subordinate universal principles to the procedural ethics of com- promise between status quo and revisionist states in the international system. The process of give-and-take must apply to challenges to the existing order. Those who proﬁt most by that order can in the long run only hope to maintain it by making suﬃcient concessions to 10 EDWARD HALLETT CARR make it tolerable to those who proﬁt by it the least, and the responsibility for seeing that these changes take place as far as possible in an orderly way rests as much on the defenders as on the challengers.1 Carr argued that the relationship between realism and utopianism was dynamic and dialectical. Although he was a severe critic of utopian thinking in the 1930s and 1940s, he also acknowledged that realism without utopianism could descend into a cynical realpolitik: ‘[c]onsistent realism excludes four things which appear to be essential ingredients of all eﬀective political thinking: a ﬁnite goal, an emotional appeal, a right of moral judgement, and a ground for action’.2 There is, however, a tension between Carr’s portrayal of the clash between realism and utopianism, and his deeply felt need to mediate between them. On the one hand, his discussion of the theoretical diﬀerences between these ‘isms’ is infused with determinism (the Marxist idea that norms and values are simply epiphenomenal expressions of the ruling class), as well as metaphysical dualism (‘the two elements – utopia and reality – belong to two diﬀerent planes that can never meet’3). The antithesis between them is analogously identiﬁed with a series of dichotomies that Carr posits as free will versus determinism, the relation between theory and practice, the intellectual versus the bureaucrat, and ethics versus politics. Carr then collapses the antinomy into an apparent dichotomy of power and morality, the latter subordinate to the former to have any eﬀect. Given such pre- suppositions, realism and utopianism are both unsound doctrines, but each can only act as a ‘corrective’ to the other. But they cannot be transcended or synthesized in thought. All one can do, it seems, is see-saw between them, using the strengths of one to attack the other when one of them appears to be getting the upper hand in informing international diplomacy and the conduct of great power foreign policy. On the other hand, Carr did argue that ‘sound political thought and sound political life will be found only where both have their place’.4 Whatever the philosophical diﬃculties involved in his argu- ment, Carr sought to reconcile the competing tendencies in his own diagnoses and prescriptions for international stability. This led to some judgements that have been criticized, although, it must be said, with the luxury of hindsight. The most blatant example was Carr’s endorsement of the British government’s policy of appeasing Germany in the late 1930s. This was included in the ﬁrst edition of The Twenty Years’ Crisis when it was published in 1939, but signiﬁcantly absent 11 EDWARD HALLETT CARR from the second edition published in 1946. As William Fox observed in his excellent examination of Carr’s views in the late 1930s, ‘[a] good big theory does give a handle on the long- and middle-run future, but it does not point directly and ineluctably to the big shortrun decisions’.5 During and immediately after the Second World War, Carr turned his attention to the prospects for international stability that did not attempt to predict short-term policies or diplomatic episodes. As a man of the Left, Carr hoped that it would be possible to learn from the Soviet experience in social and economic planning, and he hoped that communism and capitalism could coexist without undue antag- onism. This was based on his deep suspicion of capitalism to promote equality among people or states, and his conviction that, for all its faults, communism rested on the belief in a common moral purpose that was necessary to generate the self-sacriﬁce that could provide a common bond between the weak and the powerful. Carr was acutely aware of the dramatic changes in foreign aﬀairs brought about since the French Revolution and the growth of democracy. Mass partici- pation in the political process could not be sustained unless Western societies discovered new ways to manage the market and achieve forms of social democracy that required intervention in the market- place rather than naive nineteenth-century ideas derived from sim- plistic readings of Adam Smith. Notwithstanding his own somewhat naive view of Hitler in the late 1930s, he acknowledged that the Second World War was as much a product of revolutionary ideology as the clash of enduring national interests. Despite the horror of war, he argued that the experience of fascism and communism had con- tributed useful lessons to Western democracies, particularly the need for social planning and international intervention to tame the inequities of global capitalism.6 In his book Nationalism and After (1945), Carr compared the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century with those of the twentieth and, as with his other books of this period, he laments the application of ideas that may have been applicable in the past, but which were now obsolete. For those interested in the problems of nationalism at the end of the Cold War, Nationalism and After is still required reading, for many of its arguments and analyses are as relevant today as they were when Carr made them. In this book, he argues that the principle of national self-determination is no longer a recipe for freedom, but guarantees conﬂict insofar as its interpretation along ethnic lines is incompatible with the ethnic diversity of most states. Furthermore, twentieth-century nationalism is closely linked to 12 EDWARD HALLETT CARR the rise of public participation in the political system, which would lead to a dramatic rise in the number of ‘nation-states’ if the process were not managed. At the same time, there was a clear incompatibility between the value of national self-determination as an expression of freedom and the waning economic power of the nation-state to deliver either military or social security to its people. According to Carr, the solution was to create large multinational and regional organizations of states which could better co-ordinate their policies and sustain a commitment to social justice than either Soviet-style communism or American ‘free enterprise’. In light of the experience of the European states during the Cold War, Nationalism and After was prophetic in its foresight. Carr did not write a great deal on international relations per se after his two great works of the 1930s and 1940s. From the early 1950s onwards, he devoted his attention to the historical analysis of the Soviet Union, an enormous project in which Carr tried to empathize with the problems faced by Soviet leaders and refused to engage in a ‘moralistic’ condemnation of the Soviet political system. He always argued, however, that American fears of Soviet ‘aggression’ towards Western Europe were exaggerated, and that the West had much to learn from the East in its own attempts to reconcile individual freedom and egalitarian social policies: The fate of the western world will turn on its ability to meet the Soviet challenge by a successful search for new forms of social and economic action in which all that is valid in the individualist and democratic traditions can be applied to the problems of mass civilisation.7 One might argue that the collapse of the Soviet Union has not meant the end of the challenge, merely the end of the need to confront a state whose own attempts to meet it failed so dramatically. Carr himself oﬀered no blueprint for how that challenge might be met. To do so would have been precisely the kind of utopian exercise he deplored. Carr died in 1982 at the age of 90, and his work continues to inspire debate among students of international relations. While he has been hailed as the author of one of the most important classics of the twentieth century, his portrayal of the continuing theoretical division between realism and utopianism is by no means convincing for many scholars in the ﬁeld. Some, particularly those associated with the ‘English School’ of international relations, such as Martin Wight and 13 EDWARD HALLETT CARR Hedley Bull, have argued that his dichotomy between realism and utopianism is far too rigid and simplistic an attempt to distinguish between theoretical approaches in the study of international relations. Others have condemned Carr’s apparent relativism, and his refusal to defend his socialist values in a far more explicit manner than he ever attempted. To some extent, this can be attributed to Carr’s Marxist beliefs (never elaborated in his own published work), and his indebt- edness to the work of Karl Mannheim on the sociology of knowl- edge. But whatever its philosophical weakness, Carr’s work reminds us that however we justify our commitment to values such as liberty or equality, they remain abstract and somewhat meaningless unless they are embodied in concrete political and economic arrangements, the reform of which is contingent on a complex historical process in which progress cannot be guaranteed. For a profound analysis of Carr’s view on historical progress, stu- dents can look no further than his text What is History?, which not only reveals Carr’s own views but remains a classic work on the reading and writing of history. Among other issues, Carr examines the notion of progress in history and historiography since the Enlightenment, noting that what began as a secularization of Christian teleology needed to be continually modiﬁed by later historians, and eventually by Carr himself, in order not to succumb to mysticism or to cynicism, but to maintain a constructive view of the past. In this book Carr tries to mediate between a view of progress as an eternal Platonic form standing outside history, and a historically determined goal set in the future, unformed and susceptible to being shaped by attitudes in the present. Carr’s early training, it must be remembered, took place within the full ﬂood of Victorian optimism, only later to be reduced by the more pessimistic realities embodied in the world wars. The decline of England as a world power made Carr a spokes- man for his generation when he expressed the notion that historical progress could not be true in the Victorian sense, yet might be true in some broader, complex sense. Carr’s own notion of historical progress is embodied in the idea that ‘man is capable of proﬁting (not that he necessarily proﬁts) by the experience of his predecessors, that progress in history, unlike evolution in nature, rests on the transmission of acquired assets.’8 According to Carr, progress is not a straight line to perfection, but it depends on the ability of people to learn from the past, and upon the ability of the historian to transmit that past to his or her culture in a useful way in light of contemporary problems. Human civilizations may rise, fall and stagnate as diﬀerent groups within society gain and lose power, but ‘progress’ in Carr’s modiﬁed 14 EDWARD HALLETT CARR sense can still persist. This is because as more and more diﬀerent events take place, the collective memory of historians becomes richer. This in turn enables them more accurately to glimpse the ever-changing direction in which history is moving, and even to alter that direction to a more favourable course. We may still debate the merits of Carr’s own modest attempts to steer the course of international history, but there can be no doubt that among the 50 great thinkers introduced in this book, Carr remains among the greatest. Notes 1. E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939, 2nd edn, London, Macmillan, 1946, pp. 87–88. 2. Ibid., p. 89. 3. Ibid., p. 93. 4. Ibid., p. 10. 5. William Fox, ‘E.H. Carr and political realism: vision and revision’, Review of International Studies 11 (1985), p. 5. 6. See, in particular, E.H. Carr, Nationalism and After, London, Macmillan, 1945. 7. E.H. Carr, The Soviet Impact on the Western World, London, Macmillan, 1947. 8. E.H. Carr, What is History?, London, Macmillan, 1961, p. 117. Carr’s major writings Britain: A Study of Foreign Policy From the Versailles Treaty to the Outbreak of War, London, Longmans, Green, 1939. Conditions of Peace, London, Macmillan, 1942. Nationalism and After, London, Macmillan, 1945. The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939, 2nd edn, London, Macmillan, 1946. The Soviet Impact on the Western World, London, Macmillan, 1947. A History of Soviet Russia (14 volumes), London, Macmillan, 1950–78. The New Society, London, Macmillan, 1951. German–Soviet Relations Between the Two World Wars, 1919–1939, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1951. Socialism in One Country, 1924–1926 (three volumes), Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1958–64. The Romantic Exiles: A Nineteenth Century Portrait Gallery, Boston, Beacon Press, 1961. What is History? London, Macmillan, 1961. From Napoleon to Stalin, and Other Essays, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1980. See also: Bull, Morgenthau, Wight 15 ROBERT GILPIN Further reading Abramsky, Chimen, Essays in Honour of E.H. Carr, London, Macmillan, 1970. Bull, Hedley, ‘The Twenty Years Crisis thirty years on’, International Journal 24 (1969), pp. 625–38. Evans, Graham, ‘E.H. Carr and international relations’, British Journal of International Studies 1 (1975), pp. 77–97. Fox, William, ‘Carr and political realism: vision and revision’, Review of International Studies 11 (1985), pp. 1–16. Gellner, Ernest, ‘Nationalism reconsidered and E.H. Carr’, Review of International Studies 18 (1992), pp. 285–93. Howe, Paul, ‘The utopian realism of E.H. Carr’, Review of International Studies 20 (1994), pp. 277–97. Morgenthau, Hans J., ‘The political science of E.H. Carr’, World Politics 1 (1949), pp. 127–34. Smith, Michael J., Realist Thought From Weber to Kissinger, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1986, pp. 68–98. ROBERT GILPIN Robert G. Gilpin is Professor of Politics and International Aﬀairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. He has been a congressional fellow and vice-president of the American Political Science Association, and he is best known for his work in international political economy. In response to those who argue that realism is overly concerned with the politics of military security and tends to ignore economic forces, Gilpin attempts to reintegrate the study of international politics (concerned with the role of power in shaping relations among states) with international economic forces (concerned with the nature and dynamics of ﬁrms in the marketplace). In addition, he is one of the few realists concerned with change, particularly in trying to explain the rise and decline of states over time. This has been a growth area in the study of international relations over the past couple of decades. It was inspired both by concern with the apparent economic decline of the United States in the 1970s and 1980s relative to Europe and Japan, and by the arguments of many liberals that the growth of economic interdependence among states was weakening their power and attenuating the historical relationship between military force and the ability to sustain state national interests. Gilpin’s work reveals a consistent concern with the role of power and the management of power by the state. His ﬁrst major publica- tion was a study of the tensions between American nuclear scientists 16 ROBERT GILPIN and the US government on nuclear weapons policies in the 1950s. But his most important work emerged in the mid-1970s and the 1980s in the area of international political economy. Contrary to those who argued that the growth of economic interdependence was undermining the state and reducing the relevance of coercive military power to determine economic inﬂuence in world aﬀairs, Gilpin argued that a liberal international trading order depended on the very factors it was alleged to be undermining, namely the presence of a powerful state to provide what have come to be called international ‘public goods’. The basic argument is this. Markets cannot ﬂourish in producing and distributing goods and services in the absence of a state to provide certain prerequisites. By deﬁnition, markets depend on the transfer, via an eﬃcient price mechanism, of goods and services that can be bought and sold among private actors who exchange ownership rights. But markets themselves depend on the state to provide, via coercion, regulation and taxation, certain ‘public goods’ that markets themselves cannot generate. These include a legal infrastructure of property rights and laws to make contracts binding, a coercive infra- structure to ensure that laws are obeyed, and a stable medium of exchange (money) to ensure a standard of valuation for goods and services. Within the territorial borders of the state, governments pro- vide such goods. Internationally, of course, there is no world state capable of replicating their provision on a global scale. Building on the work of Charles Kindleberger and E.H. Carr’s analysis of the role of Great Britain in the international economy of the nineteenth century, Gilpin argues that stability and the ‘liberalization’ of international exchange depend on the existence of a ‘hegemon’ that is both able and willing to provide international ‘public goods’, such as law and order and a stable currency for ﬁnancing trade. The overall direction of Gilpin’s argument can be found in his three most important works, US Power and the Multinational Corporation (1975); War and Change in World Politics (1981); and The Political Economy of International Relations (1987). The ﬁrst of these is an examination of the foreign inﬂuence of American multinational cor- porations in the postwar era. Contrary to some of the conventional wisdom that the spread and autonomy of overseas corporate activity was beyond the control of the US government, Gilpin argues that their overseas activity can be understood only in the context of the open liberal economy established under US auspices at the end of the Second World War. Its hegemonic leadership and anti-Sovietism was the basis of its commitment to ‘liberal internationalism’ and the 17 ROBERT GILPIN establishment of international institutions to facilitate the dramatic expansion of trade among capitalist states in the 1950s and 1960s. Gilpin’s next two major works were written in the context of a growing debate about the alleged decline of the United States in international relations, particularly in light of the dramatic economic recovery of Europe and Japan from the devastation of the Second World War. Although far more attention was paid to the work of Paul Kennedy in the late 1980s, Gilpin’s War and Change in World Politics is an important attempt to place the debate within an overall theory of the rise and decline of hegemonic states in international relations. The originality of this work lies in its attempt to integrate propositions both at the level of the international system and at the level of individual states within the system. Starting with certain assumptions about states, he seeks to explain the emergence and change of systems of states within a rational choice framework. In addition, he distinguishes between three kinds of change in international relations. Interaction change simply refers to changing interstate relations within a given balance of power. Systemic change refers to the overall governance of the system, the number of great powers within it, and the shift in identity of predominant powers, usually after a systemic war involving challenges to, and attempts to maintain, the existing distribution of power. Finally, and most signiﬁcantly, systems change refers to a fundamental transformation of the actors and thus the nature of the system per se. For example, one could point to the emergence of the state system itself in the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries, or the change from empires to nation-states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Gilpin’s model of systemic change is based on a number of assumptions about states that he derives from microeconomic, rational choice theory. This is used to postulate a cyclical theory of change in the international system. It consists of ﬁve key propositions. (1) An international system is stable (in a state of equilibrium) if no state believes it proﬁtable to change the system. (2) A state will attempt to change the international system if the expected beneﬁts exceed the expected costs. (3) A state will seek to change the international system through ter- ritorial, political and economic expansion until the marginal costs of further change are equal to or greater than the expected beneﬁts. (4) Once equilibrium between the costs and beneﬁts of further change and expansion is reached, the tendency is for the economic costs 18 ROBERT GILPIN of maintaining the status quo to rise faster than the economic capacity to sustain the status quo. (5) If the disequilibrium in the international system is not resolved, then the system will be changed, and a new equilibrium reﬂect- ing the redistribution of power will be established.1 As far as Gilpin is concerned, world history since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) has been a period of systemic change within a state-centric system, and the stability or otherwise of the system depends on the existence of a political and economic hegemon. But stability is diﬃcult to sustain because economic and technological change is never evenly distributed among states. Hence over time there is an increasing gap between the status and prestige of particular states and the power they are able to deploy to safeguard their national interests. Despite the need for peaceful change in the system to manage the process of change, Gilpin grimly observes that, up to now, ‘the principal mechanism of change…has been war, or what we shall call hegemonic war (i.e., a war that determines which state or states will be dominant and will govern the system)’.2 The factors that lie behind change in the international system are largely environ- mental, and these structure the array of incentives that states have to try and change the system to their beneﬁt, such as population shifts and the diﬀusion of military technology throughout the system. Although the decline of empires seems to conﬁrm the obsolescence of territorial expansion and its substitution by hegemonic states (such as Britain in the nineteenth century and the United States after 1945), the attempts by Germany and Japan to expand their territorial control in the ﬁrst half of this century suggest that the mode of change remains indeterminate. In the context of the debate over the alleged decline of the United States in international relations, the last two propositions deserve particular attention. Essentially, Gilpin believes that all hegemonies are transient because the costs of maintaining them rise more quickly than the resources available to do so. On the one hand, the hegemon is unable to prevent the diﬀusion of its economic skills and techniques to other states. On the other hand, the hegemon must confront the rising expectations of its own citizens. Over time, they will privilege consumption over production and resist further sacriﬁces in order to maintain the supremacy of the hegemon on the international stage. The combination of internal and external factors leads to what Gilpin calls ‘a severe ﬁscal crisis’ for the hegemon. It then has a limited choice of options. If it wishes to maintain its power, it can either 19 ROBERT GILPIN confront its internal obstacles and reverse the tendency towards complacency, or it can attack rising powers before they mount a challenge of their own. Alternatively, it can seek to reduce its over- seas commitments and promote strategic alliances with other states. Gilpin illustrates the former with reference to imperial China, while in the 1930s, Britain attempted the latter course of action. Gilpin is sceptical about the lessons of history, however. While each of these options has been pursued with varying degrees of success in the past, neither has been able to prevent the onset of war to resolve the dis- equilibrium of global power. In the late twentieth century, such a conclusion raises urgent questions about contemporary stability in the international system and the need to discover means other than war for managing the process of change, as the next ‘systemic’ war is likely to be the last in the context of nuclear weapons. The third book, The Political Economy of International Relations (1987), is both a major textbook in the ﬁeld of international political economy and a continuation of the themes addressed in his previous work. After exploring a range of sources of change that encompass ﬁnance, trade and investment in the postwar era, Gilpin concludes that the period of American hegemony in the international system is coming to an end, and that Japan is emerging as a potential hegemon in the international system. He believes that the decline in American power, caused by a mixture of internal and external forces, is detri- mental to the maintenance of a liberal economic order among states. On the one hand, American exports of technology and capital have facilitated the recovery of Europe and Japan, while on the other hand, the costs of containing the Soviet Union have made it diﬃcult for the United States to maintain its competitive edge over its rivals. In particular, the United States became a major debtor nation in the 1980s, while Japan had accrued large capital surpluses that it had invested in the United States. Gilpin believes that this situation has grave consequences for the continuation of a liberal trading system, as over time the United States will be reluctant to pay for public goods the beneﬁts of which accrue to ‘free riders’ in the international system such as Japan. Gilpin argues that the decline of US hegemony is likely to usher in a period of ‘new mercantilism’, perhaps even the establish- ment of new trading blocs under the respective regional hegemonies of the United States, Germany and Japan. Thus, in contrast to those who talk of ‘globalization’ in the world economy, Gilpin emphasizes the fundamental changes in the world economy that are a by-product of the erosion of American hegemony. He believes that we are now in the midst of a transition from a 20 ROBERT GILPIN long period of liberal internationalism to one of mercantilism, and whether the latter will be malign or benign remains a very open question. Gilpin’s work has been subject to a number of criticisms, notwith- standing his novel attempt to adapt realism to account for change in the international system. Some writers have drawn attention to the ambiguity and indeterminacy of the theory, while others have argued that Gilpin’s pessimism regarding the future of the international system is based almost entirely on his ideological predisposition for realism and that his theory of change is little more than the application of a social Darwinian approach to the study of international relations. The ﬁrst type of criticism is particularly pertinent in light of the dramatic changes that have taken place in the past decade. Gilpin did not predict the end of the Cold War, but one could argue that the collapse of the Soviet Union has rendered much of his diagnosis of US decline obsolete, as the hegemon has no further need to engage in an expensive military competition with its arch-rival. The inde- terminacy of the theory, particularly insofar as it tends to rely on two case studies (Britain and the United States), leaves much room for debate. As Richardson points out, If the US is in the declining stage of the cycle, then Gilpin’s theory can suggest some of the reasons why, and can suggest options and constraints. But is it? How do we know that it is not, like imperial China or eighteenth-century Britain or France, capable of rejuvenation?…Gilpin’s theory is not rigorous enough to specify criteria which would resolve the issue: he assumes that the model of the declining hegemon ﬁts the US, but does not, beyond a comparison with [its] position in the immediate post- war period, spell out the reasoning behind the assumption.3 One could well argue that in the last decade of the twentieth century, unipolarity has replaced bipolarity in international relations, and that the economic growth of the United States in the past few years, combined with the relative decline of Japan and other ‘newly indus- trializing countries’ in the Asia-Paciﬁc region, renders much of the concern with American ‘decline’ out of date. The issue is diﬃcult to resolve in the absence of agreed criteria either for measuring power in the contemporary international system, or for the selection of relevant timescales. One could also argue that China is the most important emerging hegemon at the end of the twentieth century, rather than Japan. 21 ROBERT GILPIN Others have drawn attention to the way in which Gilpin’s theory is informed less by its empirical validity than by his underlying assump- tions and value judgements, rooted in a very pessimistic view of the world. As he has said himself, ‘it’s a jungle out there!’4 Gilpin’s world view remains state-centric, and he is not convinced that the historic patterns of relations among states in an anarchical world are going to change in the near future. Some critics have suggested that Gilpin’s theoretical work is based on a fundamental assumption that the United States is a benign hegemon, but it is quite possible to construe nuclear deterrence as a public ‘bad’ rather than a ‘good’. Despite his attempt to synthesize realism and microeconomic utilitarianism, many remain sceptical about whether this provides an adequate basis on which to justify his underlying pessimism about the possibility of progressive reform in the international system. Notes 1. Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 10–11. 2. Ibid., p. 15. 3. James Richardson, ‘Paul Kennedy and international relations theory: a comparison with Robert Gilpin’, Australian Journal of International Aﬀairs 45 (1991), pp. 73–74. For an attempt to test Gilpin’s theory in the context of British hegemony, see K. Edward Spezio, ‘British hegemony and major power war: an empirical test of Gilpin’s model of hegemonic governance’, International Studies Quarterly 34 (1990), pp. 165–81. 4. Robert Gilpin, ‘The richness of the tradition of political realism’, International Organization 38 (1984), p. 290. For his most recent articula- tion and defence of realism, see Robert Gilpin, ‘No one loves a political realist’, Security Studies 5 (1996), pp. 4–26 (special issue edited by Benjamin Frankel, London, Frank Cass). Gilpin’s major writings Scientists and National Policy-Making, New York, Columbia University Press, 1964. France in the Age of the Scientiﬁc State, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1968. ‘The politics of transnational economic relations’, International Organization 25 (1971), pp. 398–419. Also in Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye (eds), Transnational Relations and World Politics, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1970, pp. 48–69. US Power and the Multinational Corporation: The Political Economy of Direct Foreign Investment, New York, Basic Books, 1975. ‘Three models of the future’, International Organization 29 (1975), pp. 30–67. 22 JOHN HERZ ‘Economic interdependence and national security in historical perspective’, in Klaus Knorr and Frank N. Trager (eds), Economic Issues and National Security, Lawrence, Kansas, Regents Press of Kansas, 1977, pp. 19–66. War and Change in World Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981. ‘The richness of the tradition of political realism’, International Organization 38 (1984), pp. 287–304. The Political Economy of International Relations, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1987. ‘The theory of hegemonic war’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18 (1988), pp. 591–613. ‘The cycle of great powers: has it ﬁnally been broken?’, in Geir Lundestad (ed.), The Fall of Great Powers: Peace, Stability, and Legitimacy, Oslo, Scandinavian University Press, 1994. See also: Cox, Keohane, Krasner Further reading Gowa, Joanne, ‘Rational hegemons, excludable goods, and small groups: an epitaph for hegemonic stability theory’, World Politics 41 (1989), pp. 307–24. Grundberg, Isabelle, ‘Exploring the “myth” of hegemonic stability’, International Organisation 44 (1990), pp. 431–77. Rogowski, Roger, ‘Structure, growth, power: three rationalist accounts’, International Organization 37 (1993), pp. 713–38. JOHN HERZ As with the work of Susan Strange, the writing of John Herz cannot be placed squarely within a ‘realist’ school of thought without some qualiﬁcation. In his ﬁrst book, he describes his own position as ‘realist liberalism’, a term that sums up the work of someone who acknowl- edges all the empirical constraints identiﬁed by more traditional ‘realists’, but who also aﬃrms the need to transcend those constraints in search of a more humane and just world order.1 In his work on the ‘territorial state’ in the 1950s, Herz believed that its transcendence was imminent, facilitated by the apparent failure of the state to fulﬁl its main purpose in the nuclear era – to defend its citizens. By the late 1960s, he acknowledged that the state was unlikely to dis- appear, despite the arrival of nuclear weapons, and his writing took on a more normative dimension, appealing to the need for more enlightened views of self-interest in foreign policy. In 1981 he wrote that: 23 JOHN HERZ We live in an age where threats to the survival of all of us – nuclear superarmament, populations outrunning food supplies and energy resources, destruction of man’s habitat – concern all nations and people, and thus must aﬀect foreign policy-making as much as views of security.2 This shift in emphasis was accompanied by a sustained concern with what might be called an ‘immanent critique’ of the way in which foreign policy is often framed within what Herz argues are inap- propriate ‘images’ of the world. He urges us (as observers of and participants in international relations) to distinguish between that part of ‘reality’ which is ﬁxed and immutable and that part which arises from ‘the perceptual and conceptual structures that we…bestow on the world’.3 In his long career, Herz has always tried to do so, and to evaluate dominant perceptions in light of what he once referred to as ‘mild internationalism’. In a short essay written for the International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences in 1968, he distinguishes between a mildly internationalist ideology and more radical forms of inter- nationalism. The former, which is both practical and desirable, aims at a world in which states remain the most important political actors, they are democratic and self-determining, and conﬂicts are settled by mediation, arbitration and the application of international law in the context of growing interdependence and co-operation. The goal of radical internationalism is to replace the existing system of sovereign states with some kind of world government.4 Herz was born in 1908 in Germany. He attended the University of Cologne, where he studied legal and political philosophy as well as constitutional and international law. After completing his doctorate under the supervision of the legal theorist Hans Kelsen, Herz moved to Switzerland, where he enrolled in courses in international relations at the Geneva Institut de Hautes Etudes Internationales. As with so many of the key thinkers in this book (Deutsch, Haas, Morgenthau), he went to the United States in order to escape the Nazis shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. He taught at Howard University, Columbia University, the New School for Social Research in New York and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (1939–41). He then worked for the Oﬃce of Strategic Services and the State Department, and after the war he took up a permanent position as Professor of Political Science at the City College of New York and head of the doctoral programme at the City University of New York. His experience at the State Department taught him ‘how little one’s work and eﬀorts at a lower 24 JOHN HERZ level mean for top decision-makers’.5 He believed that the United States could have done more to establish democratic foundations in Germany in the early postwar years, but did not do so because it was so eager to build it up as a bulwark against Soviet communism. As a teacher, Herz continued to work on German democratization and the problems of regime change in comparative European politics.6 In addition to his work on international relations, Herz is well regarded as a student of Germany and has edited the journal Comparative Politics for a number of years. In 1951, Herz published his ﬁrst major book, Political Realism and Political Idealism. In it he tries to steer a middle way between ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’. He deﬁnes ‘realism’ as thought which ‘takes into consideration the implications for political life of those security and power factors which are inherent in human society’.7 In contrast, political idealism either ignores such factors, or believes that they will disappear once ‘rational’ solutions to political problems are presented and adopted. However, in contrast to Hans Morgenthau and other ‘classical realists’ of the period, Herz does not trace the ‘power factors’ to permanent characteristics of human nature. He acknowledges that the latter has many dimensions – biological, metaphysical and even spiritual – that combine to determine human behaviour, and any adequate account must recognize human ethical properties. Instead of appealing to metaphysics, Herz posits the existence of a ‘security dilemma’ as the key factor. It arises from the individual’s consciousness that others may be seeking his or her destruction, so there is always some need for self-defence, which in turn may make others insecure. What is true among individuals is equally relevant to understanding group behaviour. In fact, Herz argues that the security dilemma is more acute among groups, for the simple reason that groups can develop means of self-defence that are far more destructive than those available to individuals. Moreover, insofar as individuals come to equate their own identity and worth with that of the group to which they belong, they may be prepared to sacriﬁce their life on behalf of the survival of the group. Thus, even if one makes the most optimistic assumptions about the nature and motives of individuals and groups, the security dilemma will persist as long as there remain groups that are not subordinate to a higher authority. In the modern world, these are sovereign states. Of course, this argument is not original to Herz. Hobbes said something very similar in the mid-seventeenth century. Herz has become famous for the label ‘security dilemma’, however, as well as 25 JOHN HERZ for the skill with which he uses the basic framework to illustrate the history of international relations over the past 200 years. In the body of his book, Herz examines certain movements for democracy, nationalism and internationalism, showing how the ‘idealistic’ rhetoric behind such movements always ran into ‘realistic’ problems that doomed them to failure. At the same time, he acknowledges that ‘ideals’ are also part of political and historical ‘reality’, and that any philosophy that denies ideals engenders lethargy and despair. Robert Berki sums up Herz’s argument as follows: Political means in the realist perspective must be fashioned so as to combat the ‘resistance’ of forces that hinder ideals, which means to enter the game that is played imperfectly in politics, with imperfect rules. The promised land lies perpetually over the horizon, and imagined means which derive their value from this promised land are unsuitable.8 Over the next two decades, Herz continued to elaborate on the nature of the security dilemma in postwar international relations. In 1959, he published his second classic work, International Politics in the Atomic Age. This introduced readers to Herz’s views on the rise (and imminent collapse) of the ‘permeability’ of the sovereign state. The book is divided into two parts. The ﬁrst provides an account of the rise of the state that focuses on the role of military technology, while the second describes the crisis of the state in the nuclear era. While the ﬁrst book focuses on the role of political philosophy in shaping our attitudes to international politics in general, the second is an application of ‘liberal internationalism’ in the speciﬁc context of nuclear bipolarity and the Cold War. Observing the variety of units that have engaged in ‘international relations’ throughout history, Herz tries to account for the rise of the modern state in terms of its ability to provide protection and security to its citizens against armed attack from outsiders. As such, Herz engages in a form of ‘strategic determinism’. In particular, he focuses on the change from the small and vulnerable political units of the European Middle Ages (such as fortiﬁed castles and walled cities) to the larger units that came to be known as nation-states. He claims that the invention and widespread use of gunpowder enabled rulers, along with artillery and standing armies, to destroy feudal authorities within larger areas, which they could then protect by building ‘impenetrable’ fortiﬁcations. Compared with what preceded them, sovereign states were ‘territorially impenetrable’. 26 JOHN HERZ The crucial change in this situation took place in the twentieth century. First, there was a dramatic increase in the destructive capacity of air power between the two world wars, even though some military strategists had exaggerated its ability to win wars. As the experience of the Second World War demonstrated, the widespread bombing of industrial infrastructure did not incapacitate the states on which it was inﬂicted, and the targeting of civilians did not promote a general desire to sue for peace regardless of the consequences. For example, the ﬁre-bombing of Tokyo with conventional weapons in early 1945 caused more direct casualties than the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima in August, and there was no evidence at the time to sug- gest that it would make a conventional invasion by allied troops unnecessary. Herz argues that nuclear weapons have now destroyed the ‘impermeability’ of the sovereign state, so that traditional ‘balance of power’ politics are ﬁnally obsolete. Of course, the ‘realist’ in him acknowledges that the security dilemma still operates, even though the means used to tame it undermine the purpose of doing so. Throughout the book, Herz laments the way in which the United States and the Soviet Union have failed to adapt to the new situation, building thousands more weapons than are required for the purposes of deterrence. The appalling condition of ‘nuclear overkill’ and the elaborate schemes of civilian strategists and nuclear weapons designers to escape from the new security dilemma have meant that we have lost sight of the more fundamental problem: The very fact that technical developments of weapons and armaments in themselves wield such a tremendous impact has meant that they have almost come to dictate policies, instead of policies determining the type and choice of weapons, their use, amount of armaments, and so forth. In other words, instead of weapons serving policy, policy is becoming the mere servant of a weapon that more and more constitutes its own raison d’être.9 In short, the world had become too small for traditional territoriality and the protection it had previously provided. The balance of terror was not the continuation of the old balance of power. War, which had functioned as part of the dynamics of the balance, was no longer a rational means of policy. Herz claimed that what had once been considered ‘idealistic’ – namely the dilution of state sovereignty – was now an overriding national interest. Almost a decade later, Herz acknowledged that ‘developments have rendered me doubtful of the correctness of my previous anticipations’.10 27 JOHN HERZ In the late 1950s, he had implied that the territorial state was in demise. Technological change, which he had claimed was a crucial factor in determining the rise of the state, would now facilitate the emergence of new forms of transnational and co-operative governance. Herz felt conﬁdent that arguments associated in the 1930s with idealism were now consistent with realism. What caused him to change his mind was not only the failure of political leaders to pay any more attention to him than they had when he worked for the State Department. Herz identiﬁes three reasons for the continuation of territoriality as a marker of political diﬀerentiation. First, decolonization had led to a remarkable ‘creation’ of new states, and Herz admitted that he had not anticipated the speed with which ‘old empires’ had collapsed. Second, Herz admitted that the technological determinism of his earlier argument was in fact deterministic. He had not acknowledged the power of nationalism in sustaining the territorial state regardless of its military permeability in the nuclear age. Third, while Herz continued to lament the arms race between the two superpowers, he later claimed that the balance of terror was more robust than he had thought a decade earlier. In 1968, he argued that if the nuclear arms race was to be controlled in the future, a ‘holding operation’ was necessary. This would consist of a set of policies such as ‘arms control, demarcation of bloc spheres, avoidance of nuclear proliferation…and reducing the role of the ideologies of communism and anticommunism’.11 This is the context in which Herz defended the policies of détente in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He did so by reinforcing the distinction between constraints that were inherent in the security dilemma, and misplaced perceptions of those constraints based on inappropriate images of international relations. For example, in 1974 he was vigorous in attacking the idea, then proposed by some conservative critics, that détente was a form of ‘appeasement’.12 Herz argued that there was very little similarity between the international political situation of the 1930s and the 1970s. The United States was negotiating from a position of strength, not weakness. The existence of nuclear weapons ensured that ‘aggression’ on the part of the (then) Soviet Union would be an act of suicide, not opportunism, and that détente, far from being a radical departure from realism, was in fact merely a prerequisite for more radical policies in the ‘common interest’ of humankind in survival. During the 1980s, Herz became increasingly disillusioned with American foreign policy. Détente, upon which he had placed so much hope, collapsed and was replaced by what Fred Halliday famously called the ‘second’ Cold War.13 The renewal of the nuclear arms race, the superpowers’ intervention in Afghanistan and Central 28 JOHN HERZ America, and their failure to even begin tackling ecological and demographic problems all helped to impart ‘a despairing and anguished romanticism’ to his writing.14 Herz does not think that the end of the Cold War justiﬁes com- placency in the analysis of international relations. The Cold War came to an end because one superpower could no longer sustain its competition with the West, on ideological or economic terms. It did not come to an end as a result of any policy-makers deciding to place the ‘human’ interest over the ‘national’ interest. Although the fear of nuclear war between the great powers has lessened, it has been replaced by new fears of nuclear proliferation, and the legacy of old images lives on. For example, the United States continues to evoke the legacy ‘appeasement’ in justifying its policies towards Iraq, and there is no indication that what Herz calls ‘a survival ethic’ has replaced what he disparages as ‘regional parochial’ ethics in international relations. In his retirement, Herz has dedicated himself to what he calls ‘survival research’, concerned less with descriptive and explanatory analyses of contemporary international relations than with urging us to abandon the images of international relations that make ‘regional parochialism’ possible. Notes 1. John Herz, Political Realism and Political Idealism: A Study in Theories and Realities, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1951, p. 129. 2. John Herz, ‘Political realism revisited’, International Studies Quarterly 25 (1981), p. 184. 3. Ibid., p. 185. 4. John Herz, ‘International relations: ideological aspects’, International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, London, Macmillan, 1968, pp. 72–73. 5. John Herz, ‘An internationalist’s journey through the century’, in Joseph Kruzel and James N. Rosenau (eds), Journeys Through World Politics: Autobiographical Reﬂections of Thirty-Four Academic Travellers, Lexington, Massachusetts, Lexington Books, 1989, p. 252. 6. See, for example, John Herz (ed.), From Dictatorship to Democracy: Coping With the Legacies of Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism, Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1982. 7. John Herz, Political Realism and Political Idealism, op. cit., p. 18. 8. Robert N. Berki, Political Realism, London, Dent, 1981, p. 29. 9. John Herz, International Politics in the Atomic Age, New York, Columbia University Press, 1959, p. 220. 10. John Herz, ‘The territorial state revisited – reﬂections on the future of the nation-state’, Polity 1 (1968), p. 12. 11. John Herz, ‘An internationalist’s journey through the century’, op. cit., p. 253. 29 SAMUEL HUNTINGTON 12. John Herz, ‘Détente and appeasement from a political scientist’s vantage point’, in John Herz, The Nation-State and the Crisis of World Politics: Essays on International Politics in the Twentieth Century, New York, David McKay, 1976, pp. 279–89. 13. Fred Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War, London, Verso, 1983. 14. Kenneth Thompson, Masters of International Thought: Major Twentieth- Century Theorists and the World Crisis, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1980, p. 112. Herz’s major writings ‘Idealist internationalism and the security dilemma’, World Politics 2 (1949), pp. 157–80. Political Realism and Political Idealism: A Study in Theories and Realities, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1951. ‘The rise and demise of the territorial state’, World Politics 9 (1957), pp. 473–93. International Politics in the Atomic Age, New York, Columbia University Press, 1959. Government and Politics in the Twentieth Century (with Gwendolen Margaret Carter), New York, Praeger, 1961. The Government of Germany, New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967. ‘The territorial state revisited’, Polity 1 (1968), pp. 11–34. The Nation-State and the Crisis of World Politics: Essays on International Politics in the Twentieth Century, New York, David McKay, 1976. ‘Technology, ethics, and international relations’, Social Research 43 (1976), pp. 98–113. ‘Political realism revisited’, International Studies Quarterly 25 (1981), pp. 179–83. ‘An internationalist’s journey through the century’, in Joseph Kruzel and James N. Rosenau (eds), Journeys Through World Politics: Autobiographical Reﬂections of Thirty-Four Academic Travellers, Lexington, Massachusetts, Lexington Books, 1989, pp. 247–61. See also: Carr, Giddens, Mann, Morgenthau Further reading Ashley, Richard K., ‘Political realism and human interests’, International Studies Quarterly 25 (1981), pp. 204–36. Wright, Quincy, ‘Realism and idealism in international politics’, World Politics 5 (1952), pp. 116–28. SAMUEL HUNTINGTON Samuel Huntington turned 80 in April 2007. Throughout his long and highly successful career as a scholar and policy-maker of international 30 SAMUEL HUNTINGTON studies, he has sought to challenge conventional knowledge, often in provocative and controversial ways. Whether or not one agrees with his views, Huntington has exercised enormous inﬂuence on international relations and comparative politics. What makes Huntington such a unique and inﬂuential thinker is his ability to frame the changing dynamics of international politics in elegant and often intriguing ways. It is largely because of his focus on power and conﬂict that his work remains closely tied to realism in international politics. In fact, both conservatism and realism focus on the preservation and promo- tion of existing social and power relations and the need to understand the inevitable qualities of war. Indeed, some of the most provocative and controversial realist thinkers of the twentieth century, including Carl Schmitt, have stressed how the preservation of power reﬂects the imminence of war and conﬂict and the disastrous consequences that may ensue if we fail to understand these ontological possibilities.1 Unlike Schmitt, however, who ultimately lost his professorship because of his loose aﬃliation with the Nazis, Huntington has enjoyed a long and highly esteemed reputation: an academic career that has spanned nearly seven decades, much of which has been spent at Harvard University, where he has taught since the early 1950s. In addition to his academic accomplishments, Huntington has played important roles in US politics and national security decision-making, serving as a co-ordinator of security planning of the National Security Council in the White House from 1977–78. At this time, he also co-founded the journal Foreign Policy, which has since gone on to become one of the most signiﬁcant and most cited policy journals in the international relations discipline. Huntington’s early academic works focused on the conﬂicting roles of liberalism and national security. His ﬁrst book, The Soldier and the State (1957), assessed the tensions between civil and military life in the United States during and before the Cold War. Here he argues that liberalism, while crucial to accounting for the liberal values of its citizenry, had failed to explain the rising professionalism of the mili- tary.2 One of his central research questions was whether the rising professionalism of the military was symptomatic of, or a counter- reaction to, the power of liberal democratic values. In addressing this question, he proposed that such professionalism required a more nuanced theory of the relationship between civilian and military life in order to overcome the limits and problems of liberalism (pro- pounded by those such as Dewey). Driving his concern was the pre- servation of the moral and political fabric of American society, that is, the need to understand the changing nature of the external threats to 31 SAMUEL HUNTINGTON these values. It was imperative, in his view, to understand the internal and changing dynamics of American power, and to focus on the eﬀects and consequences of this power. Huntington thus saw realism and conservatism as complementary forces in the struggle to secure and promote American power. American power, in his view, resides in the deeper appreciation of the values of hard work, social mobility, individual integrity and freedom of choice. It is important to stress, however, that his conservatism remains a spirited defence of conservative thought; it is by no means an endorsement of the reactionary qualities of such thought. For Huntington, the reactionary attitudes that arise from the fear and paranoia of realism and conservatism are anything but elements of conservative thought. Rather, they represent a virulent attack on the life and values that conservatives wish to preserve. In short, it is just such reactionary impulses of conservatism, or unconstrained fear, that creates disorder or disharmony in American politics.3 Certainly, then, values and political order must be promoted in a coherent way to contain the eﬀects of cultural conﬂict. In his book The Third Wave, Huntington argues that the new wave in the former Soviet-bloc countries and developing countries represents one of the great political orderings at the international level.4 Yet it is precisely this change that also introduces new forms of conﬂict, pitting against one another profoundly diﬀerent cultural inﬂuences or visions of morality and political order. This realpolitik vision of world politics lies at the core of his thesis, the ‘Clash of Civilizations’, which ﬁrst appeared in the journal Foreign Aﬀairs in 1993, and is perhaps his most well-known, provocative contribution to international relations.5 The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis holds that religion has emerged as one of the primary causes of conﬂict, and that the erosion of the nation-state, coupled with the rising inﬂuence of Western secular power (via globalization), reﬂects the likelihood that religion will replace the nation-state as the primary source of conﬂict in world politics. Its theoretical framework is based on two (seismic) indicators: so-called ‘faultlines’ between and among various civilizations, including Islam, Western secularism, Hindu, Sikh and Eastern Orthodox religion; and so-called ‘hotspots’ that refer to isolated areas of conﬂict. Of the various faultlines he describes, per- haps the best known is the North–South line that runs longitudinally from Scandanavia down through the Balkans and into North Africa. As one of the principal faultlines, this North–South line is where many traditionally warring religious groups (or ethnic groups with strong and opposing religious identities) are located, and where the 32 SAMUEL HUNTINGTON likelihood for conﬂict along religious or civilizational lines remains highest. Huntington’s seismic analogies thus suggest the predictive value or likelihood of conﬂict. This predictive value is based on the idea that, like the expected shifting of tectonic plates, ethnic wars reﬂect the building-up of competitive pressures and hostilities among ethnic groups. Because civilizations are most fundamental to the identity of these groups, they also explain the deep-seated nature of the hostilities, or the fundamental causal link between hostilities and the reassertion of civilizations. This emergent shift from the nation-state to the civilization clash highlights two trends: the increasing decline of the nation-state; and the growing pressures between Western and Islamic civilization, where wars will increasingly be fought and launched in the name of civilization, and where the pervasive inﬂuence of globalization will continue to fuel many of these clashes. Given the recent clashes between religious groups during the post- Cold War and post-9/11 era, Huntington is able to claim that civilization, not the nation-state, will probably become the funda- mental source of global conﬂict. Critics of this position argue that Huntington exaggerates civilization as an essential and possibly exclusive cause of ethnic war, and that this causal primacy remains inherently anti-modernist and in stark opposition to much of the lit- erature on nationalism, which assumes that the nation is an eternal idea. As one of the most well known scholars of nationalism, Benedict Anderson theorized that the nation is a wholly novel and eternal product of the imagination, which emerged from the fall of the great

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